Preparing for Parallella, Sunday 21st July 2013, Bletchley (UK)

Andrew Back

With thousands of Parallella boards due to go out to Kickstarter backers within the next few months, Embecosm has decided to host an event which prepares programmers for developing for the platform.

We’re incredibly honoured and excited to announce that Iann Barron, co-founder of Inmos and designer of the transputer, will be giving the keynote presentation.

The venue is the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park (UK) and the event will start at 10:00 prompt and is due to close at 17:00. There is a regular train service between London and Bletchley and the journey takes just under an hour.

Programme

10:00 Welcome — Dr Jeremy Bennett, Embecosm

Dr Jeremy Bennett is CEO of Embecosm, and an expert on hardware modeling and embedded software development. He was previously Vice President of ARC International plc, following their acquisition of Tenison Design where he had been CEO and CTO.

Dr Bennett is author of the popular textbook, “Introduction to Compiling Techniques” (McGraw-Hill 1990, 1995, 2003) and holds an MA and PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University.

10:15 Keynote: Parallel Computing (?) — Iann Barron

Parallel computing is a (no) brainer. Evolution achieved the trick aeons ago, so why can’t computer scientists do the same?

Iann Barron has been involved with parallel computing all his life. He designed a dataflow computer in 1963, a multiprocessor system in 1968 and a parallel processing component (the transputer) in 1980.

11:00 Introduction to the Epiphany SDK — Simon Cook, Embecosm

This talk will explore the various components of the Epiphany SDK (eSDK) and how they work together, to allow Parallella applications to be compiled, executed and debugged.

Simon Cook has a background in low-power processors, with a particular focus on the energy constraints of code running in embedded environments. He also provides support for our work on low level binutils for both GNU and LLVM toolchains.

Mr Cook is a graduate of the University of Bristol, where he achieved joint First Class Honours in Computer Science and Electronics.

12:00 Lunch

How Epiphany’s task-based programming model can be used to solve parallel programming problems, while avoiding common pitfalls such as deadlock and race conditions.

Examples will use Epiphany’s eMesh interconnect and we will discuss how the determinism and execution of applications are affected by its properties. Common paradigms for parallel programming will be introduced, and how applications can be decomposed into their components to communicate with each other.

James Pallister leads Embecosm’s research program into the impact of compilers on energy consumption in embedded systems.

Mr Pallister is a graduate of the University of Bristol, where he achieved joint First Class Honours in Computer Science and Electronics. He returned to Bristol in October 2012, where he is studying for a PhD in low-power multi-core system design.

13:45 Running the Epiphany SDK Examples — Simon Cook, Embecosm

A step-by-step walk through the eSDK Hello World and Matrix Multiplication examples.

14:30 Refreshment break

14:45 Introduction to OpenCL — Simon Cook, Embecosm

An introduction to the OpenCL framework and getting up and running with the COPRTHR SDK used with Parallella.

Erlang is a language which facilitates the creation of distributed systems and has traditionally been used in telecoms software. In this presentation we explore how Erlang can be used to alleviate developing distributed systems in which the Parallela plays a central role by using OpenCL in order to offload expensive computations.

Edward Tate is a software developer at Erlang Solutions. He is actively involved with the ParaPhrase project with a focus on developing a parallel framework in Erlang which enables the successes of the project to reach industrial use cases.

Mr Tate obtained his degree in Computer Science with Games Development in 2005 from the University of Hull. Since then he has worked in a variety of programming languages and projects for both industry and academia. He was actively involved with the ProTest project where he helped to further the development of a state machine testing application in Erlang. Prior to working in Erlang he has worked in projects involving Scheme, Common Lisp, C# and C++.

16:15 Museum tour

The event will close with a tour of the The National Museum of Computing galleries.

The cost for registration is £5 and this includes lunch, tea and coffee, and the museum tour. Places are strictly limited and early booking is recommended!

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[…] experience working with this application and some plans for his future explorations at the “Preparing for Parallella” event held at Bletchley Park in July. The slides Ed presented are available […]